Music and dance share many properties – both are nonverbal, both are ephemeral – but one key difference between them is that western art music was more readily notated than dance. This fundamental difference bridges text and performance and presents, for composers who know their craft well, a challenge as much as an opportunity to think about how best to write dance music, or music that accompanies actors’ movements. Some composers begin with simple mimicry, depicting a gesture through music by composing, for example, an ascending melody for a dancer who raises her arm; but other composers go beyond this basic level of mimicry and establish more sophisticated relationships between music and motion. This book is an examination of how composers came up with musical ideas based on movement. In more concrete terms, I examine how composers in eighteenth-century France – especially Paris – wrote music that accompanied motion. My argument contributes to a growing corpus of literature on music and the body, or what Elisabeth Le Guin calls “carnal musicology.”

Composers active in eighteenth-century France were fascinated by foreign dancers – those from England and Italy, in particular – who incorporated the element of pantomime in their performances, and they processed this fascination by composing music that captured the effects of these dances. Many did not try to translate dancers’ movements into music, but many recreated the most salient properties of these performances – precision, agility, sentimentality – through music. The kind of thinking across the mediums of music, gesture, and language was not new, for French composers had, since the early eighteenth century, created instrumental character pieces, some with suggestive titles, that portrayed all sorts of subjects: individuals, objects, animals, or natural phenomena. What was new around the second half of the eighteenth century was that composers deliberately represented performers’ ephemeral bodily movements through the more durable medium of notated music. In this book I argue that they used their agency – known generally as “moral liberty” in the Enlightenment – in three major ways: 1) they composed music for pantomime without following existing dance conventions; 2) their music heightened performers’ awareness of their moral liberty during performances; 3) pantomime performances stimulated spectators to recognize themselves as thinkers of liberty.